Friday, June 17, 2005

Another Good Reason To Support CAFTA...

...Chomsky's against it. Or is he? It's hard to tell from this truly incoherent monstrosity of a - a what? A blog post? An article? An op-ed? Or just the tired, sad musings of a rich old anti-capitalist? Sample some of the turgid prose here, and stack it up against anything written by Christopher Hitchens, up to and including his grocery lists:

On CAFTA, there is plenty of resistance throughout the region. Costa Rica is the only country that has something like a functioning democracy. The others are pretty much as described by the leading scholar of "democracy promotion," particularly in Latin America, the neo-Reaganite director of the Carnegie Endowment program on law and democracy. As he points out in the standard scholarly work on the period, the US was willing to tolerate only "top-down forms of democracy" that left power in the hands of the traditional elites linked to American power in highly undemocratic societies. He's not a critic, but a strong supporter of the policies, and is writing also from an insider's standpoint, having been in Reagan's State Department working on "democracy enhancement." But he's honest enough to describe the facts. It's much like the famous "New Europe" of 2003, the real hope for democracy: namely, countries that rejected the will of the large majority of the population and followed orders from Crawford Texas.

Huh? Did any of that make sense to anyone alive besides Chomsky? Yet the progressive acolytes no doubt nod sagely and whisper, 'The Great One has spoken'. Chomsky, does this neo-Reaganite you speak of have a name? If so, why not use it? Particularly mind-numbing is the last phrase, with its tired reference to a "New Europe" that takes orders from Crawford...please. Pure, unadulterated crap...

UPDATE 5:07 p.m.: Whileputting this post together, I found a particularly loathsome Chomsky piece. I wanted to work it in, but it so perfectly encapsulates the mindset of Chomsky and his followers that it deserves a good fisk, a task I hope to undertake this weekend, so come back and see me, won't you?...